MONTREAL — A man who was once convicted in the United States of supporting al-Qaida has been charged in Canada after allegedly threatening an attack.
Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, 51, allegedly told a homeless shelter employee in Montreal that he wanted to build bombs to detonate on public transit. He was charged with uttering threats.
He was ordered at a court appearance in Montreal on Friday to undergo a 30-day psychological assessment and return to court July 7, according to the newspaper La Presse.
“Both parties have reason to believe that Mr. Warsame’s criminal responsibility is in question in this case,” Vincent Petit, who represents Warsame, told the court.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed that he is the same Mohammed Warsame who spent 5½ years in solitary confinement before pleading guilty in Minnesota in 2009 to one count of conspiracy to provide material support and resources to al-Qaida, which the U.S. calls a terrorist organization that was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Warsame was sentenced to seven years and eight months in federal prison with credit for time served. He was deported to Canada in 2010 and had no fixed address at the time of the latest alleged incident.
The Old Mission Brewery, which runs several homeless shelters in Montreal, contacted police after Warsame allegedly said on May 27 that he wanted to carry out an attack that would kill a large number of people. Warsame was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, and he was formally arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Wednesday.
The Somali-born Canadian citizen admitted in his 2009 plea agreement that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to attend al-Qaida training camps, where he dined with the organization’s founder, Osama bin Laden. Prosecutors say he later sent money to one of his training camp commanders and went to the Taliban’s front line.
Warsame later settled in Minneapolis, where he continued to provide information to al-Qaida associates.
Prosecutors painted him as a jihadist who called his time in one training camp “one of the greatest experiences” of his life. They said that even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he passed along information to al-Qaida operatives about border entries and whereabouts of jihadists — and only stopped when he was arrested in December 2003.
But his attorneys depicted him as a bumbling idealist whom other fighters in the camps in Afghanistan viewed as ineffective and awkward.
Warsame’s case took unusually long to work through the U.S. court system partly because everyone — including the judge, defense attorneys and prosecutors — needed security clearances.
Retired agent Harry Samit, who was the lead FBI investigator on the case and is now director of special investigations for the professional assessment company Pearson VUE in Bloomington, recalled in an interview Friday that Warsame’s case was the second major al-Qaida case to break in Minnesota. It came after that of Zacarias Moussaoui, who took flight simulator training in Minnesota and remains the only person to stand trial in a U.S. court in the 9/11 attacks.
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Moussaoui was jailed on an immigration violation when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
Samit, whose books on the Minnesota cases will be published starting this summer, said the FBI got word as it was preparing for Moussaoui to stand trial that another al-Qaida operative was in Minneapolis. He said he is certain that Warsame was a sleeper agent who was waiting for instructions from his commanders before he was found.
While Warsame was “kind of a goofy, not very threatening guy,” Samit said, he and other agents who questioned him also concluded that he was “pure of heart and he was dedicated to the cause.” He said that was apparently enough for al-Qaida leaders who sent him Minnesota, where at a minimum they used him to raise money.
When Warsame was deported, the retired agent said, the FBI gave Canadian authorities a “full accounting” of what it knew and why the bureau still considered him a threat. So he said wasn’t surprised to learn this week, after all these years, that Warsame might still remain a danger to society.
